Hello GMG, I have been reading extensively from this forum and learning a lot. I'm familiar with some of the work of the great composers before the modern era, but looking for some specific recommendations on contemporary composers. Pierre Boulez has been my favorite composer the last couple years. Although his music is often complex, dissonant, and atonal, I hear plenty of beauty in it as well (not that complexity, dissonance and atonality preclude beauty, but it seems as though composers from previous eras designed their music more often with beauty of sound in mind, even when expressing drama or melancholy). I hope that I can get some recommendations on contemporary composers who make pretty sounds sometimes like Boulez (I'm glad there is a section for beginners here lol). I hear power and richness in other contemporary composers like Stockhausen, Varese, Berio, and some others, but it seems to me that they lack the ravishing, glistening sounds of Boulez.

Franco Donatoni wasn´t mentioned, and thinking of his experiments with style, and the shimmering, restless, vibrant and yet transparent, chamber-music-like qualities of many of his works, he´d be one of those that come to mind.

I find it almost ironic that Dutilleux is on there, didn't Pierre and Henri like hate eachother, almost like arch enemies?!

Perhaps they did, but they both do have a similar musical heritage as being post-Debussy post-Ravel French composers. Boulez had no interest in conducting any of Dutilleux's music and they often had quite different creative aims as well, but I think for anyone who already likes Boulez and wants to explore more composers based on the fact that they like Boulez, Dutilleux would seem a fairly obvious composer due to him being from the same time and place in classical music history.

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PotashPie

I agree with jessop in post #104, as far as similar syntax, especially Barraqué.

With sanantonio, what he said above is a main reason I like Boulez. He seems to use categories of sound, as in plucked strings (harp, pizz strings, guitar), struck mallet instruments (vibraphone, glockenspiel, marimba, xylophone), sustained sounds (strings, woodwinds), and it seems to be based on timbre, which was derived from electronic sounds and later IRCAM spectrographic studies of instruments.

I associate this "exotic" instrumentation with Boulez, and I think it can be heard in Messiaen (Et Exspecto, 7 Haiku) and Takemitsu (A Flock Descends, Quatrain).

There is a "jazz" Boulez ensemble recording, using a plucked stand-up bass and electric guitar, a la "jazz." It's here, for a penny:

PotashPie

That's a connection. Babbitt played jazz & popular music on a clarinet or something; Allan Forte was a jazz pianist.

Also, whenever I think of jazz and modern music together, I think of that jazz guitar in the Twilight Zone Main Theme, composed by Marius Constant. I don't think the identity of the guitarist has ever been known.